The Way Out of Enframing: Lessons from Benjamin and Baudelaire

Heidegger’s illustration of the world-disclosive capacity of artworks retains pressing significance in our present historical moment. As technology has rapidly developed, the way in which we broadly engage with art and reality has transformed alongside it. For example, technological developments in musical production have occurred alongside an increasing late-modern desire to ‘own’ music, as music is increasingly stockpiled as a resource in the form of records, then CDs, then Spotify playlists. In the twenty-first century Internet age in particular, this desire for ownership increasingly applies to art in all forms; from Netflix and endless digital re-prints of masterpiece paintings on WikiArt to online recordings of symphonic orchestras and music festivals, the Internet has largely become an efficiently ordered, gigantic standing-reserve of art to be subjectively consumed for aesthetic enjoyment. Indeed, as Heidegger convincingly argues, this technological-instrumental understanding of art filters through to all aspects of our lives, including our understanding of reality itself. This is tellingly highlighted in the way in which the invention of the iPhone has prompted the phenomenon of individuals filming and storing videos of cultural events (such as live music and street festivals), reflecting a growing late-modern desire to not only own artworks but to own real-life artistic experiences themselves. Indeed, as such videos are often filmed for the purpose of being shared to social media, these artistic experiences are often further instrumentally optimised as social resources.

Following this, Heidegger is convincing in an important sense when he suggests that implicitly understanding art as an aesthetic resource inhibits our ontological openness. Firstly, when we view art and artistic experiences as resources, we approach them through this pre-filtered purposive lens and are closed off to experiencing the art or artistic experience on its own terms. Building on this, when reality itself is understood as a resource, everything becomes a tool to be efficiently used for our own pre-conceived purposes (such as enjoying certain artworks in order to make friends or reinforce ones existing worldview), and thus cannot be revealed to us in any truly novel or unique way. In this sense, Heidegger is not arguing that we shouldn’t appreciate the phenomenological experience of witnessing great art – as he claims, “beauty belongs to advent of truth” in art14placeholder – but is instead cogently suggesting that when we view art through a pre-filtered, aestheticised lens, it loses its creatively world-disclosive capacity and renders us stuck in this calculative worldview. Indeed, whilst individuals within late modernity increasingly claim to want to spend less time on social media, form communities not tied to technological-instrumental purposes, become closer with nature and gain access to more original forms of art, technological development and usage continues to grow at an ever-increasing rate, presently exemplified in the rapid, successful expansion of digital media, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and transhumanist technologies. Resultingly, Heidegger not only presciently illustrates how our contemporary relationship with art reveals our implicit technological understanding of Being, but how late-modern Enframing sweeps us away and imprisons us in its grasp, dominating our relationship with the world (and each other) and rendering us the “plaything” of technology.15placeholder

Despite this, insofar as Heidegger problematically neglects the individual capacity for critical agency within their culture, his ontological conception of art fails to recognise the ability of existing sites of genuine artistic resistance within late modernity to challenge Enframing. As highlighted above, Heidegger argues that individuals enmeshed in Enframing cannot instrumentally create an artwork to offer us a way out of Enframing, but must wait for the organic emergence of artwork capable of disclosing a new cultural paradigm. However, in assigning individuals this passive role within their culture, Heidegger neglects that individuals – despite being fundamentally shaped by the culture from which they inherit their values, ontological understandings and language – nonetheless possess a degree of critical agency within this culture. For example, the hermeneutic phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur cogently highlights the way in which Heidegger neglects our ability to “reinterpret our embeddedness in [culture] as an essentially critical stance,” through subjecting inherited understandings to critical reasoning, transforming them, and agentially acting on them.16placeholder Following this, just as it is dubitable that every ancient Greek and Medieval individual understood Being in non-subjectivist, non-instrumental terms – especially when we consider the prominence of notions such as self-interested hubris in early Greek culture17placeholder – it is vital to note that the largely dominant grasp of Enframing over late-modern culture is not all-encompassing. Indeed, consider the extraordinary diversity, range and complexity of artworks that have been produced since the beginning of the twentieth century; a countless number of these have portrayed an understanding of reality inconsistent with (and sometimes directly opposed to) technological Enframing, disclosing Being in myriad unique and creatively original ways. Hence, instead of passively waiting for a new cultural paradigm to emerge, we would likely have more success in overcoming culturally-dominant technological understandings of Being by paying more attention to existing artworks that disclose to us a non-technological understanding of reality, and encouraging the artistic creativity capable of engendering such cultural-ontological transformations.

This, however, appears to lead us to a crossroads. It is significant to consider here that the critical reasoning required for critical agency, through attempting to offer us an instrumental way out of Enframing in the form of deliberately crafted artworks, may remain trapped in the instrumental, calculative thinking that fundamentally characterises Enframing itself. We must thus confront the following question: is the notion that we can instrumentally transform artistic world-disclosure to show ourselves the way out of Enframing fatally self-contradictory?

I would argue not. Specifically, such an argument is grounded in a conceptual opposition between world-disclosure and correctness that not only ontologically misconstrues these concepts, but their relationship to truth. To the extent that world-disclosure can falsify reality – for example, ritual sacrifices throughout human history have disclosed and reinforced false ontological understandings in which benevolent food harvests required human sacrifice – it, on its own, lacks the vital critical dimension necessary for any understanding of truth at all. This is not to merely reassert the ostensibly naïve assumption of truth-as-correctness, but to highlight the potential for a reconciliatory understanding of truth as both critical and world-disclosive. As Nikolas Kompridis convincingly argues, through conceptualising the happening-of-truth and disclosure-of-a-world as the same phenomenon, Heidegger is forced to promote a conception of truth in which the capacities for disclosing worlds and giving reasons are made “mutually exclusive”. In doing this, however, Heidegger problematically neglects that truth can involve both world-disclosure and critical reasoning, and that this actually strengthens the potential for world-disclosure itself.18placeholder

Let us return to the potential for revolutionary cultural-events-as-artworks. Hubert Dreyfus plausibly suggests that despite its eventual failure to be culturally preserved, the ‘music of the sixties’ (embodied by Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Woodstock Music Festival) represented a potentially revolutionary form of art in the Heideggerian sense.19placeholder For Dreyfus, not only did this artistic movement embody a way of life and worldly understanding outside of Enframing – where “rationality, wilful activity and flexible, efficient control” were “made subservient” to the values of “peace, tolerance… openness, enjoyment of nature, dancing and Dionysian ecstasy” – but it freely used the technological “power of electronic media” in the service of these concerns. However, where Dreyfus re-emphasises the point that this movement arose organically, and that “a new sense of reality [cannot] be made a goal,” he rests on Heidegger’s dubitable ontological opposition between world-disclosure and critical-agential reasoning. Indeed, individual artists such Bob Dylan critically reflected on the culture of their times, and purposefully created art that critically responded to, and instrumentally attempted to transform, aspects of this culture from within. Furthermore, for enough people to “recognise” and “coalesce around” this new non-technological understanding of Being (a lack of which, Dreyfus argues, caused this movement to fail), non-artist individuals must not only respond to the new world artistically disclosed to them, but be able to critically resist opposing perspectives – for example, mainstream conservative stereotypes surrounding the danger of drugs and unproductivity – and use their agential capacity to indeed make a new sense of reality a goal (as the organisers of Woodstock did). Insofar as truth involves both world-disclosure and critical reasoning, our abilities to critically reason and agentially act in accordance with these reasons are necessary for the creation and preservation of culturally-ontologically revolutionary artworks.

This leads us to another significant point, one that further illuminates the fundamental flaw at the heart of Heidegger’s later philosophy: in neglecting individual critical agency, Heidegger is not only ontologically but ethically problematic, and finds his thought mired in an overly restrictive conception of culture and action. To the extent that individuals possess a degree of critical agency within their culture, they are (at least partially) individually and collectively responsible for their culture. Building on this, as we bear some partial responsibility for our cultural-ontological world, our cultural and artistic understandings and practises require some ethical concern with this world, unless we wish to argue – as Heidegger does not – that the ontological understandings and practises of our cultural world are unimportant. Following this, as artworks possess the potential to shape our cultural worlds, the ethical perspectives promoted by an artwork must be critically engaged with by the individuals within one’s culture.

Consider artworks such as J.M.W Turner’s Dido Building Carthage, or the rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815). The painting depicts the founding of Carthage as a Phoenician colony, portraying a vibrant, sunlit landscape in which people bathe in the river and begin to construct the classical architecture of the city. In this depiction, the painting discloses a world of colonial exploration and cultural beginning; the earth is being materially shaped into a new (tangible and ontological) world, one that has carried over aspects from its overseas past and reshaped them in a novel (notably beautiful) natural context. Indeed, the influential painting – alongside similar seaport paintings by Turner and artists such as Claude Lorraine (who directly inspired the work) – in many ways articulate the colonial context in which they were created, an ‘Age of Exploration’ surrounding the unrealised possibilities available for Western cultural expansion and re-invention around the world. However, such a colonial understanding of the world directly resulted in widespread, and ongoing, exploitation, domination, and genocide. In this sense, opening ourselves to the world-disclosive capacity of such artworks must occur alongside critical-ethical engagement, insofar as uncritical engagement with them possesses the capacity to open or inspire deeply problematic ethical perspectives.

More viscerally, consider Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will (1935). A Nazi propaganda film romantically depicting Nazi German ceremonies and rallies, the film has nonetheless (despite its ethical content) been consistently praised as creatively innovative and stylistically “genius” by art critics since its release.20placeholder Not only were these acclaimed artistic techniques (successfully) harnessed by the film in the direct cultural-political promotion of Nazism during its rise, but its artistic portrayal of this fascist and genocidal political movement was profoundly Heideggerian; specifically, such artistic techniques creatively disclosed a mythologised articulation of a new, unifying cultural paradigm, one grounded in an internal transformation of historical German self-understandings and cultural practises. This illustrates the fundamental deficiency in Heidegger’s neglect of critical agency – where Riefenstahl’s film wholly evidences art’s world-disclosive, culturally-unifying capacity, it also wholly evidences the ethically problematic nature of neglecting individual critical agency, both in creating and responding to artworks.

We may now turn to the poetry of Baudelaire, an artist in whose work we find a transformative world-disclosive capacity that does not neglect, but indeed springs forth from, a deeply critical agency. It is oft-noted that Baudelaire’s lyric-poetic depictions of urban modernity articulated the ontological character of modernity from within – as Paul Verlaine put it, the “profound originality of Charles Baudelaire [was] to represent powerfully and essentially modern man”. Simultaneously, Baudelaire’s articulation of modernity attempted to poetically challenge what he saw as its dehumanising, de-worlding aspects. Walter Benjamin, a thinker who consistently drew attention to the galvanising, emancipatory potential underlying our modern relationship with art, recognised in Baudelaire such a clash between revolutionary and self-abasing modern energies. In one sense, we can understand Baudelaire as a “classical poet,” as obsessed with visions of beauty and antiquity as he was with the depravity of modern life; affirming beauty meant not only wilfully recognising it in the background of the everyday, but affirming the beauty of the darkness, violence and sensuality present in natural, vital energies, energies that had been twisted but remained latently powerful in modernity.21placeholder Yet in another sense, Benjamin leads us to understand Baudelaire as the uniquely great modern artist – one who not only presents us with a vision of the world beyond the atomised technologisation of modernity, but does so by critically speaking through modernity, shaping modernity to reveal both its enriching and stifling impulses on its own terms.

The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire captures Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s cultural-political significance in its greatest richness and depth. Benjamin begins the essay weaving through Baudelaire, Marx, and revolutionary activist Louis Auguste Blanqui, painting a picture of nineteenth-century urban life through the lens of industrialisation and the political-economic struggles that it gave rise to. At the same time, Benjamin sees in Baudelaire a unique appreciation for the novelty of modernity, interrogating not only essentially modern character-types such as the revolutionary bohème and the flâneur, but the phenomenological experience of the rushing, amorphous urban crowd. For Baudelaire, modern life was characterised by such frenzied experiences, in which one found oneself simultaneously lost and individuated in their anonymity. In doing so, Benjamin constructs Baudelaire as a figure who “let the spectacle of the crowd act upon him” in a way that intoxicated him without letting it blind him to the “horrible social reality” of impoverished urban life.22placeholder Hence, Benjamin argues that through imbuing the modern urban world with novel, ontologically transformative meanings in his poetry, Baudelaire not only poetically brought-forth the modern world, but critically attempted to “interrupt the course of [this] world” and reveal that cultural-ontological developments and injustices are open to be challenged. Baudelaire’s simultaneous enjoyment of the fleeting beauty and grotesque, mechanical ugliness of modernity was thus only possible insofar as he was already “half withdrawn” from it, and attempted to “sunder himself from it as a hero”.23placeholder

“I give this verse to you in case my name,

A vessel favoured by a strong north wind,

Lands in distant epochs with some fame

And brings a dream at evening to man’s mind.”24placeholder

It is this state of half-withdrawnness that is of philosophical interest here. In the same way that accepting that we are not inevitably trapped in inherited cultural perspectives and are capable of critically reshaping our historically-situated standpoint requires moving beyond the conservatism that defines Heidegger’s (and later Gadamer’s) hermeneutical circle, spurring ontological transformation first requires not cultural immersion, but the partial withdrawal from one’s epochal horizon. This is what Benjamin refers to when he describes Baudelaire as the poet who conveyed the ontological “shock” of modernity, and yet constructed a transgressive vision out of the ruins of this shock.25placeholder And it is from this vantage point that, for Benjamin, Baudelaire came to see the hero – modelled on the form of the proletarian who required a gladiatorial constitution simply to earn daily wages – as the “true subject of modernism,” and sculpted his image of the artist after this heroic image. Modern life offered an assault on the “natural productive élan” of its subjects.26placeholder In response, Baudelaire saw poetry as a form of wilful hermeneutical labour that sought its own ancient, heroic, “Herculean” task: to “give shape” to modernity in order to revolt against it, to overcome it by moving through it.27placeholder

At the culmination of the essay, Benjamin draws attention to the following of Baudelaire’s poems:

“See, sheltered from the swells

There in the still canals

Those drowsy ships that dream of sailing forth;

It is to satisfy

Your least desire, they ply

Hither through all the waters of the earth.”28placeholder

For Benjamin, this stanza encapsulates the contradiction at the heart of modern ‘heroism’:

“This famous stanza has a rocking rhythm; its movement seizes the ships which lie fast in the canals. To be rocked between the extremes, as is the privilege of ships – that is what Baudelaire longed for. The ships emerge where the profound, secret, and paradoxical image of his dreams is involved: being supported and sheltered by greatness. ‘These beautiful big ships that lie on the still water imperceptibly rocking, these strong ships that look so idle and so nostalgic – are they not asking us in a mute language: when are we setting out for happiness?’”29placeholder

It is here that Benjamin locates the clash between classical and modern conceptions of heroism that he views as defining Baudelaire’s work. The task of the poet is to spur the oppressed, alienated individual into action, to rise from a state of indolence towards the achievement of greatness; this, however, cannot be done through the nostalgic attempt to revive a lost past, but through a unique reshaping of one’s present sociohistorical context. At the same time, Benjamin illuminates a pessimism at Baudelaire’s core, who views modernity as a tragedy in which true heroes cannot be formed, but in which the spectre of the hero is merely a part that is sometimes acted. For Baudelaire, ultimately the “high seas beckon to him in vain, for his life is under an ill star. Modernism turns out to be his doom. The hero was not provided for in it; it has no use for this type. It makes him fast in the secure harbour forever and abandons him to everlasting idleness”.30placeholder It is noteworthy that such pessimism towards the notion of heroism in modernity undoubtedly laces our present cultural-ontological climate.

Despite this, Benjamin maintains that Baudelaire was not forsaken but instead forged a unique historical space for revolt: for Benjamin, “Blanqui’s action was the sister of Baudelaire’s dream.”31placeholder Baudelaire’s poetic vision was not merely that of paradox, but that of a revolutionary strength that acknowledged but sought to overcome the paradoxical nature of the modern subject and hero. Hence, as Benjamin summates: “There is a special constellation in which greatness and indolence meet in human beings, too. This constellation governed Baudelaire’s life. He deciphered it and called it ‘modernism’”.32placeholder

In Being and Time, Heidegger characterises individual cultural embeddedness as “being-lost in the publicness of the they,” in which human agents, despite potential moments of seizing one’s own possibility for authentic existence, are constantly “falling prey” to the average mode of everydayness inherited from their surrounding sociocultural environment.33placeholder Baudelaire above all despises the everlasting idleness – the “ruthless vice” of “pallid indolence”34placeholder – that sees individuals accept and fall prey to stale, inherited cultural understandings, and at every turn presents us with a vision of life-affirming sensuality, of élan, of vitality, that rallies against decay, staleness, idleness and ennui. There is a fundamental connection between vitality of creative action and vitality of thought. Baudelaire’s heroic vision of poetry is that in which critically-guided action is not neglected but forcefully revived in the service of cultural-ontological transformation. It is a poetry that attempts to speak beyond the perpetual, hermeneutical tension that underlies the experience of the modern subject. And in a significant sense it opens such a perspective for ourselves, revealing that what is needed in twenty-first century late modernity is not a return to a nostalgic vision of a romantic past, but the emergence of a transgressive, communally world-disclosive artform that is both fundamentally from our epoch and beyond our epoch. Of course, the form in which such a unifying amalgamation of critical-agential and Dionysian energies may (or indeed, ever) emerge remains open.

Deleuze, in the quote with which I prefaced this essay, perceived something similar in the transformative potential of great artwork. Referring in his case to cinema specifically, Deleuze draws attention to the capacity for a fundamentally modern artform, a revolutionary and democratic “art of the masses,” to radically alter modern subjectivities and pave the way for a “people to come” out of a splintered modernity.35placeholder Deleuze’s political-ontological conception of art here bears further similarities to that of Benjamin; a recognition of its fascist potential when separated from critical agency,36placeholder and a post-Heideggerian emphasis on the potential for a world-disclosive “shock” to spur original thinking.37placeholder It may be argued that cinema missed its historical moment for such a task. And yet throughout What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari construct philosophy as a concept-creating endeavour that may assist such a mass-transformative project, and do not seek the end of philosophy as Heidegger does. Philosophy here is likewise “not inspired by truth”, but instead retains foundational significance as the pursuit of the “Interesting, Remarkable or Important”:

“Criticism implies new concepts (of the thing criticised) just as much as the most positive creation. Concepts must have irregular contours moulded on their living material. What is naturally uninteresting? Flimsy concepts, what Nietzsche called the ‘formless and fluid daubs of concepts’ – or, on the contrary, concepts that are too regular, petrified, and reduced to a framework. In this respect, the most universal concepts, those presented as eternal forms or values, are the most skeletal and least interesting. Nothing positive is done, nothing at all, in the domains of either criticism or history, when we are content to brandish ready-made old concepts like skeletons intended to intimidate any creation, without seeing that the ancient philosophers from whom we borrow them were already doing what we would like to prevent modern philosophers from doing: they were creating their concepts, and they were not happy just to clean and scrape bones like the critic and historian of our time. Even the history of philosophy is completely without interest if it does not undertake to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage, even if this comes at the price of turning it against itself.”38placeholder

It is in this space, in the half-withdrawn awakening of dormant concepts, that philosophy can clear the way for a necessarily self-reflective form of art. Enframing and world-disclosure are two concepts that must pressingly be reawakened and reshaped. Paying attention to the complex interplay between critical reflection and creative vitality, we can glean from Baudelaire a crystallisation of a world-interrupting and world-opening – that is to say, a fundamentally world-disclosive – human agency.